Articles by Adam Freedman

When Professor Andrei Linde of Stanford University first read a paper in the 1980s by MIT professor Alan Guth, then a postdoc at Stanford, he was taken by its description of cosmic “inflation,” the notion that one trillionth of one trillionth of one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe — for an infinitely brief moment — expanded faster than the speed of light. Linde immediately started improving the theory, completing his reworking before Guth’s next paper came from the United States that said the theory was impossible. “It’s a good thing the Soviet mail system was so slow, I didn’t hear I couldn’t improve the theory until I already had!” jokes Linde.